F- I I I
595
If
a company or institution is using people like digits and massing
them in schools of learning toward appreciating new ideas and new
inventions, I react to that and try to
pose
a problem to think in terms
of humanity again. So this picture is partial, incomplete maybe, but a
fragment I am expending into the boiler.
SWENSON;
In 1961 it seemed that you Were adopting techniques and
styles that were not your own but those of sign painters, professional
and almost objec:;tive techniques. That had the aspect of anti-style;
yet
Time
magazine recently referred to "Rosenquist's precise, realistic
style."
ROSENQUIST;
Well, the style I use was gained by doing outdoor com–
mercial work as hard and as fast as I could. My techniques for me
are still anti-style. I have an idea what I want to do, what it will
look like when I want it finished-in between is just a hell of a lot
of work.
When they say the Rosenquist style is very precise, maybe they
just know that painting style as they know it is going out of style.
Ways of accomplishing things are extended to different generations
in oblique places. Billboard painting techniques are much like Mexican
muralist techniques. Few people extend themselves in it at the
time because it is not very much considered.
SWENSON;
You worried some about the painting for the New York
State pavilion at the World's Fair, that it would be dwarfed by some
hundred-foot bride on the Kodak building. Is there any relationship
between that painting and the size of the
F-l11?
ROSENQUIST;
The picture at the World's Fair had a relation to the
rest of the landscape, the huge buildings, huge pink Kodacolor photo–
graphs. That painting was exposed to other things of large scale and
had to exist on some other terms than those I usually deal with.
The
F-l1l
was enclosed-four walls of a room in a gallery. My
idea was to make an extension of ways of showing art in a gallery,
instead of showing single pictures with wall space that usually gives
your eye a relief. In this picture, because it did seal up all the walls,
I could ret the dial and put in the stops and rests for the person's
eye in the whole room instead of allowing the eye to wander and
think
in an empty space. You couldn't shut it out, so I could set
the rests.
SWENSON;
Put in relief?
ROSENQUIST;
Such as a light sky-blue area, which I've always felt as a
relief. Or the one empty wall space with the missing canvas.
At first the missing panel was just to expose n:ature, that is,
